Testing the Hypothesis

• Value "failure" as much as "success." For typical grant making programs, when projects or specific components of projects fail to meet their objectives, they can only be written off as losses. For a hypothesis testing program, however, these "failures" serve an important purpose -- they become your controls. For ethical and moral reasons (similar to medical research with human subjects), it is not possible to initially select "deficient" projects to serve as experimental controls. However, when projects run into difficulties, you can learn as much from the challenges that they face as from the successes that they have.

  Example: The "Challenges" section of the "Stories from the Field" in Section 2 dramatically illustrates how valuable this information can be.

• Define areas in which projects in your "network" can collaborate with one another and with outside projects. One of the best sources of technical assistance for the projects that you are supporting are the other projects in your "network." You can effectively tap this knowledge by facilitating workshops and other exchanges of information about focused topics. In addition, you can also work with other projects outside of your network that are involved in similar issues -- these projects can also potentially be used to expand your "sample size."

  Example: BCN has focused its networking efforts on a narrow range of topics including a) monitoring plan development and b) enterprise skill building. This intense focus has been quite successful in assisting projects and enhancing BCN's understanding in both areas. In addition, we have been able to reach out to other groups working on similar issues.

• Keep the larger development context of an areain perspective. Often, aspects of the larger development context of the area, such as population densities and existing patterns of economic activity and prevailing agricultural practices, have serious implications for the success or failure of projects. These contexts should be clearly recognized in the project design, selection and evaluation.

  Example: BCN's adaptive management approach encourages partners to develop conceptual models that place their project in its ecological, social, economic, and political context.

• Be open to change. By definition, the process of adaptive management involves detecting and responding to changes in the biological, socioeconomic, and institutional context of the project. Allow your partners to be flexible.

  Example: BCN's adaptive management approach encourages partners to go through multiple iterations of their conceptual model to incorporate new information.

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